Re: A good book

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 22:37:06 GMT
Message-ID: <mmBrg.128744$iF6.90931@pd7tw2no>

Chris Smith wrote:
> Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:

>> Are you suggesting that predicate calculus is just some different tool?
>>

>
> I'm suggesting that you've yet to establish the connection between:
>
> (a) predicate calculus and elegant code
> (b) databases and predicate calculus
> ...

I'll take a stab:

1. if 'elegant' means minimal (what I like to think even though I've known people who thought it meant terse or symmetrical or somehow pretty) a lot of bright philosphers over a lot of years managed to get the common understanding of fopl notation and operators down to a pretty small/minimal set (nand/nor, exists, forall). that seems promising for minimal code.
2. Codd did this in a small number of pages back in 1969/1970.

(I don't claim that's the end of it and there may be a bigger logic that deals more directly with some of the issues that crop up in relational theory, such as transitive closure which seems to need an arbitrary additional operator at the moment or how to mechanically assess a program without invoking it, the non-fundamentalness of keys and so forth.)

p Received on Fri Jul 07 2006 - 17:37:06 CDT